Rayna Denison

Anime Fandom and the Liminal Spaces between Fan Creativity and Piracy

Anime fan subtitling and online distribution offer rare insights into the relationship between fan creativity and industry conceptualizations of piracy. This article attempts to de-polarize this debate (wherein fans are presented as invaluable amateur producers or, alternatively, as overt pirates) in order to examine the roles played by these liminally situated fan producers in relation to the wider anime fan and industrial communities. These active fans are now represented as good or bad dependent on other groups’ investments in their practices, and unpacking these conceptualizations provides a better view of how anime fandom may be indicative of larger changes in online fan community construction.

Transcultural creativity in anime: Hybrid identities in the production, distribution, texts and fandom of Japanese anime

ABSTRACT This article seeks to examine some of the overlooked transcultural aspects and elements of creativity in anime. Through a series of contemporary case studies, it is argued that anime supports an array of transcultural creative practices that span across borders, hybridize content and even force the creation of new types of text and distribution. The attention to the transcultural here is an attempt to move beyond discussions of how Japanese anime are, and to open up a space in which to discuss their relevance beyond their home nation. In these ways, the creative work undertaken by those within and beyond the industries related to anime is demonstrating the global reach of Japanese cultural products.

Anime tourism: discursive construction and reception of the Studio Ghibli Art Museum

Abstract Anime tourism has been an important phenomenon within Japanese culture for the past decade. The signs of this global tourism can be read in the growing number of museums and theme parks in Japan dedicated to the history, and contemporary global success, of anime culture. However, the reputed aims and forms of these entertainment venues varies wildly, with some anime companies choosing to venerate animators, as with the Osamu Tezuka Museums in Kyoto and Takarazuka, while, alternatively, others are adopting theme park aesthetics, as with Sanrio Puroland. A common denominator among these anime venues is, however, an attempt extend the life and value of their products. The article argues that the Studio Ghibli Art Museum is an attempt to rebrand their hit films as ‘art’ products, but that the responses of the museums international users display a tendency to perform a resistant tourist and consumerist gaze within the museum space. This article is an attempt to delve into the complex relationship between anime producers and global consumers, viewing the museum space as one in which the cultural meanings of anime are put to the test.

Star-Spangled Ghibli: Star Voices in the American Versions of Hayao Miyazaki's Films

This article offers an examination of the use of American stars in re-voicing a set of Japanese animated texts. The author argues that a new industrial, contextual and textual understanding of stardom is required to penetrate the dense network of meanings attached to star voices in animation. Furthermore, she utilizes a mixed textual and contextual approach to several of Studio Ghiblis American DVD releases to consider the markets for and meanings of anime in America. In so doing this article represents an intervention into a range of academic debates around the nature of contemporary stardom and the significance of anime in America.

Disaster and relief: The 3.11 Tohoku and Fukushima disasters and Japan’s media industries:

The earthquake and tsunami which occurred in the Tohoku region of Japan (northern Japan) on 11 March 2011 have taken the lives of more than 15,000 people. The disaster and the accident in the nuclear reactors in Fukushima have left about 330,000 people homeless. The catastrophe has affected not only Japanese politics, economics, society and people’s mentalities, but also its cultural industries. This article attempts to investigate two contemporary issues tracing the effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake (the Tohoku Disaster) on Japan’s media landscape: its impact on Japanese media production and distribution, particularly of its most transnationally famous forms, manga and anime; and how perceptions of ‘soft power’ have fluctuated in this difficult media moment. The research uses a cultural and industrial studies approach based on discourse analysis, focusing on the period immediately following the Tohoku Disaster in order to map significant shifts and unexpected results and responses from within Japan’s cultural industries to the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima power plant disasters.

Redistributing Japanese Television Dorama

Fans’ online activities are often traced through the most active participatory members of fan communities. By contrast, this article examines online fan distribution from the outside in as a way of reconsidering how the peripheries of a fandom shape the communities at the heart of a fan culture. Taking Japanese dorama (television drama series) as my case study, I examine how dorama fans redistribute texts and how they communicate with one another while doing so. I argue that these practices reveal an emerging shadow economy that tantalizingly challenges some entrenched ideas about online fan communities and their creative work.

Japanese and Korean Film Franchising and Adaptation

Many of the most memorable characters, settings and worlds of Japanese and Korean cinema are the products of adaptation. For example, these practices are keeping alive local legends, from the folkt...

Bollywood DVD: The Relationship Between Distributive Technology and Content in Transnational Cinema

Academic attempts to understand the impact of DVD on film texts and markets have been primarily focused on ‘Hollywood’ filmmaking. This chapter offers an attempt to combine an analysis of film texts with a consideration of how cultural, generic and industrial production beyond Hollywood can impact on how DVD technologies are used. I trace a particular historical period of transnational DVD production emanating from popular Hindi-language cinema in order to chart how and where the distinctive traces of filmgoing and filmmaking practices from within that industry have impacted on its transnational dissemination. In doing so, I challenge the conceptualisations of genre and national cinema that have shaped the debates about DVD’s significance to the global film economy.

Franchising and Failure: Discourses of Failure within the Japanese-American Speed Racer Franchise

history in the United States: Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (1963–66, Tetsuwan Atomu) and Tatsuo Yoshida’s Speed Racer (1967–68, Mahha go go go). 1 However, where Astro Boy has been studied in some depth by academics, as a Tezuka creation and as the fi rst anime to cross over to U.S. television, Speed Racer has received scant attention. 2 Speed Racer’s relative academic invisibility is contrasted by its recent renewal as a multimedia franchise. Starting in the 1990s, with the formation of Speed Racer Enterprises by John and Jim Rocknowski, Speed Racer has been rerun (initially on MTV), has been adapted multiple times for television and the cinema, and has been made available through a wide range of merchandise. 3 Th e franchise has also been augmented in Japan by its original creators, Tatsunoko Production Co., whose Mach Project Production Committee was created in 2003 to exploit the earliest incarnations of Speed Racer, especially the television anime Mahha go go go. 4 As these separate national approaches to Speed Racer’s continuing production suggest, the franchise is not a straightforwardly “Japanese” manga or anime property. Th is article examines the recent liveaction Speed Racer fi lm in order to investigate Franchising and Failure: Discourses of Failure within the JapaneseAmerican Speed Racer Franchise R A Y N A D E N I S O N